Maybe one day there'll be a product to replace Word, but it won't succeed by claiming to be a generalist replacement but only as a niche product that solves a particularly painful problem for lawyers and then expands over time to capture more use cases.

Well, yes, but the binary blob is a zip archive of a directory of text XML files, and one could imagine tooling that wraps the git interaction in an unzip/zip bracket.

The real problem is that lawyers, like basically all other non-programmers, neither know nor care about the sequence of bytes that makes a file in the minds of programmers. In their minds the file IS what they see when they open it in word: a sequence of white rectangles with text laid out on it in specific ways, including tables with borders, etc. The fact that a lot of really complicated stuff goes on inside the file to get the WYSIWYG rendering is not only irrelevant to them, it's unknown.

Maybe the answer here will be along the lines of Karpathy's musings about making LLMs work directly with pixels (images of text), instead of encoded text and tokenizers [1]. An AI tool would take the document visually-standard legal document form, and read it, and produce output with edits, redlines, etc as directed by the user.

[1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305

Yeah, I know that sounds fake-deep but we've seen this before; I'm old enough to remember when WordPerfect was the standard that wasn't going anywhere.

It will just be one of those inflection-point thingies.

I do regret being overly paranoid in my 20s and not writing down my master passphrase to my personal documents -- I lost a huge chunk of diaries and writings due to that.

Fun fact: ODT uses Blowfish encryptio. Remember when we made Bruce Schnierer a meme like Chuck Norris? He wrote it -- apparently it's faster than AES?

Anyways, if you save with password in a .ODT file, if you pick a strong password you've got a nice little self contained encrypted volume that doesn't require "suspicious" software to open.

ANYWAYS, a bit of a tangent but... looking forward to death of Word.

Sources of standard: http://www.ada-auth.org/arm-files/2022-SRC.zip

Format tool can be found here: http://www.ada-auth.org/arm.html#Format_Tool

Sample output with edits: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22aarm/html/AA-5-2.html

Red color is for Ada 2012 -> Ada 2012 TC1 diff, green color is for Ada 2012 TC1 -> Ada 2022 diff.

Curious what the top 3 features are that are missing. The article only mentions multi-level decimal clause numbering (e.g. 9.1.2). Seems like it would be a very easy feature to add. I've heard that line numbering is also a big legal thing, but Docs already has that.

As an attorney, this is what kept me from switching to LibreOffice or Google Docs. I gave it a shot, but since the other attorneys I work with (both in and outside the US) and my clients all use Word, I ended up wasting a lot of time fixing files after converting between formats. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it.

I’m fairly tech-savvy, but many of my coworkers struggle with the mental effort required to switch to new software. Two colleagues I greatly respect still use WordPerfect and Word 2003 because they dislike change so much. It's too much of a lift for these people to wholesale switch word processors.

Opaque blobs like docx are not suitable for applications where the content of the document has to be completely clear to the various competing parties involved in something like a contract. It only works because the document gets printed out and then signed with a pen. If we want to move past that we need something different.

It's a bad format for the imaginary problem but it shows that government action can actually force a change in workflows in the legal profession.

Akoma Ntoso has been pushed onto legislative bodies and by extension onto most of the legal profession in the EU and in many 3rd world countries. It does not solve the diff problem but it kind of solves the machine-readable storage of laws.

I wonder if M/S got that "fixed", early on they had a hard time with it.

The OP may be exaggerating a bit (it's marketing for their startup after all), but I'd expect that if you want to develop a product for a certain market, researching how the customers in that market operate and what their technical constraints are would be one of the first things to do.

Obviously, random people on Twitter won't do this, but here there seem to be entire companies that expect the whole legal system to move into their proprietary cloud. How did they imagine this would work?

Nonetheless, agree with the author that I don't see anything disturbing Word in that space for a long time, as good luck trying to get a middle-aged with minimal tech understanding to learn and use LaTeX over Word.

I believe this is not only infuriating, I am pretty sure it is actually illegal. If lawyers would think that visuals are more important than semantics, they would explicitly discriminate blind people.